This invention relates generally to network communications, and more particularly but not exclusively, to performing discovery and analysis of mobile web sites, and identifying a mobile user-agent useable for crawling the discovered mobile web sites.
In today's society, mobile computing devices are becoming increasingly more common. Many mobile computing devices, such as personal digital assistants, cellular phones, and the like, may be employed to communicate voice messages, emails, text messages, and so forth, as well as to search for information over the Internet. It is not uncommon to see a person on a bus, train, or even a boat, to be using their mobile devices to search for merchants, restaurants, music, or the like.
However, there are currently a large variety of mobile devices, many with different features, and capabilities. Unfortunately, many of today's web sites are not designed to accommodate the variety of mobile devices. Thus, many mobile devices may not be able to view most of the web sites. Moreover, even while a web site may be organized for viewing with a particular type of mobile device, they may not be well connected with other web sites similarly configured for that type of mobile device. Worse yet, naming conventions used to identify content that is viewable by a mobile device may be inconsistent between web sites. Thus, the mobile device user may be unable to readily search for and locate information that may be viewable using their mobile device. Accordingly, there is a need in the industry to provide mobile device users with an improved mechanism for locating web content viewable by their mobile device. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.